SELLING POWER OF ATHLETES AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Nowadays, the power of social media works in the favour of Marketing as it makes easier for all brands the entire process of discovering potential consumers and reaching out to them fairly easily through the influencers. As far as this blog is concerned, the “influencers” here refer to renowned athletes.

Social Media has effectively transformed the way we connect with the world. In earlier days, one would simply just wait for the paper man to deliver the newspaper or walk to the nearest newspaper stand looking for papers to stay updated about the happenings around the world. However, in today’s date, all latest news reaches us via social media within seconds of its happening.

This instantaneous shift to digital media has impacted all (or most) sectors of communication, and marketing happens to be one of them. It is hard to deny that we are undergoing a change of style. Now talking about how athletes have become a source for the same, it is quite apparent that athletes have now become a great and direct medium for reaching out to the customers.

Sports have a tendency to arouse passion. They are a source of health, fitness, unity, optimism, energy, and motivation. All of these factors are fairly enticing, enough to grab the attention of potential consumers.

Having a star athlete like Virat Kohli, with an estimated brand value worth $14.5 million, for example, as an ambassador for a brand would be considered a rather smart move. There is no better way to stand up to your competitors than by associating your brand with the strongest and the most influential athlete in the industry. Nevertheless, there are certain ways of taking it forward, and this is where having a profound knowledge of social media is crucial.

Posting a regular message on twitter with a mere tag is usually never a good enough advertising strategy with which a brand could win over their potential customers. The strength of that message lies in its relevance to the brand, its credibility, and the way it has been portrayed.

An endorsement deal between a brand and an athlete can, at times, prove to be a bit of a hassle. Even though, for the athletes, signing brand ambassadorial deals is a great way to boost their income, it could also sometimes be controversial. Getting sports stars to sit through lengthy shoot sessions that require elaborate and complicated production can be tough. And for the brand in question, making sure that they reached the desired audience can also cost them quite a bit of money.

In such cases, social media can prove to be very resourceful and practical, as it functions as a tool to avoid pricey market research. It’s one of the most direct ways to reach your target audience through an influencer in your industry who has more integrity and a better standing than anyone else.

The athlete helps create a customer base of thousands of people for their sponsors. These customers happen to be people who are weirdly rather keen to know what the particular athlete is consuming. People would normally go to a Nike store to see Ronaldo‘s latest football boots. However, now, all Ronaldo has to do to sell the boots is just send out one single tweet or maybe a post on Instagram of him wearing the boots, and they’re sold. Even though that one tweet or Instagram post could cost the brand upto 2-3L dollars, it’s still affordable, in comparison to one TV advertisement, also, the athlete would be saving some time and effort on that front, free from all the production hassle.

Earlier, brands would just take out print advertisements and and that would do the job, but now since influencing consumers has become a much more complicated process than it used to be, working with sports personalities is just one big step towards modernisation. Most brands are now focusing on the mass-market sports to reach out to a wider set of consumers.

Sports have the capacity to reach existing customers, potential customers, and people that never had the intention of buying from the brand, and from a marketing perspective, all three are equally fundamental. People may not be attracted to the brand or the particular product, but they will definitely be attracted to the athletes and what they stand for.

Although, the reason why these partnerships last long is because they are handled with integrity. The athlete should not just be in it to make appearances in the campaigns, but they should genuinely use the product/brand in question; this should be the mindset of both the brand and the ambassador before entering into a contract.

Social media marketing also has a fundamental role to play in helping such endorsement partnerships to evolve. With the help of digital media, the story can now be told in a more accurate and factual manner, with engaging visuals, compared to the earlier, very conventional methods, as it also helps reinforce the message.

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Published by TSCAsia

TSC Asia is a global sports corporation. Our core objective is to bring about the development of sports by connecting institutions with top level professionals.
We are currently operating in six different verticals in the sports arena, namely: Grassroots Training, Event Management, International Sports Education Programs, Personnel Management, School Training Programs, and Gaming.
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